The withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan

[steve-in-kville]

Not really my type of thread but here goes: keep in mind that the Vietnam war was more about money than anything. Not sure where I read this. but Nixon's wife had financial interest in companies that built aircraft. So there was motive to keep the war going. Really easy when its not your son on the front lines.

[appleman2006]

This debacle has once again confirmed in my mind why it is that I try not to cheer or jeer any military actions that secular nations make.
Let me try and explain.

I have been watching somewhat with dismay as many of us myself included at times have been cheering on the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan almost as if they were our troops. They are the USA's troops. And I do not think that as nonresistant people. it is our job to tell them how they should run their national defense department anymore than it is our job to tell them how to run their domestic defense departments i.e. the police.

Someone suggested that this is not so bad since the Taliban took over with little or no bloodshed. seriously. You believe that? With those scenes at the airport it is obvious the Afghans do see a strong degree of bloodshed on the horizon if it has not already started.

My point is that human world powers will always have bloodshed involved to keep order. Certainly I appreciate peace as much as the next person but I am not blind to the fact that on the world stage peace has always only existed because of the imminent threat of punishment and force if it is challenged. Ask yourself. Why does the US still have a huge military presence in South Korea and in pats of Europe to this day? Please understand. I am not saying that is a good thing. But I think it is just as wrong to say it is a bad thing.

The world will always fight. There will always be a degree of turmoil on their stage. Our job as Christians continues to be to call individuals to follow Christ's way. To be shining little lights in a dark world. And to pray for our nations that if God so wills that they may rule in such a way that we can live quiet and peaceful lives not so that we might be comfortable but rather so that God's church can grow and prosper.
And so right now I am praying for the Afghan people that they might experience peace. I am praying for all governments involved that they might do the things necessary that ultimately lead towards the most peace possible. I am not telling any of them what they should do to get to that point. That is not my job.

[Sudsy]

The world will always fight. There will always be a degree of turmoil on their stage. Our job as Christians continues to be to call individuals to follow Christ's way. To be shining little lights in a dark world. And to pray for our nations that if God so wills that they may rule in such a way that we can live quiet and peaceful lives not so that we might be comfortable but rather so that God's church can grow and prosper.
And so right now I am praying for the Afghan people that they might experience peace. I am praying for all governments involved that they might do the things necessary that ultimately lead towards the most peace possible. I am not telling any of them what they should do to get to that point. That is not my job.

Amen !

I urge you, first of all, to pray for all people. Ask God to help them; intercede on their behalf, and give thanks for them. Pray this way for kings and all who are in authority so that we can live peaceful and quiet lives marked by godliness and dignity.

1 Timothy 2:1-2 NLT

[Ken]

This debacle has once again confirmed in my mind why it is that I try not to cheer or jeer any military actions that secular nations make.
Let me try and explain.

I have been watching somewhat with dismay as many of us myself included at times have been cheering on the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan almost as if they were our troops. They are the USA's troops. And I do not think that as nonresistant people. it is our job to tell them how they should run their national defense department anymore than it is our job to tell them how to run their domestic defense departments i.e. the police.

Someone suggested that this is not so bad since the Taliban took over with little or no bloodshed. seriously. You believe that? With those scenes at the airport it is obvious the Afghans do see a strong degree of bloodshed on the horizon if it has not already started.

My point is that human world powers will always have bloodshed involved to keep order. Certainly I appreciate peace as much as the next person but I am not blind to the fact that on the world stage peace has always only existed because of the imminent threat of punishment and force if it is challenged. Ask yourself. Why does the US still have a huge military presence in South Korea and in pats of Europe to this day? Please understand. I am not saying that is a good thing. But I think it is just as wrong to say it is a bad thing.

The world will always fight. There will always be a degree of turmoil on their stage. Our job as Christians continues to be to call individuals to follow Christ's way. To be shining little lights in a dark world. And to pray for our nations that if God so wills that they may rule in such a way that we can live quiet and peaceful lives not so that we might be comfortable but rather so that God's church can grow and prosper.
And so right now I am praying for the Afghan people that they might experience peace. I am praying for all governments involved that they might do the things necessary that ultimately lead towards the most peace possible. I am not telling any of them what they should do to get to that point. That is not my job.

I am not necessarily a doctrinaire pacifist. But I have a hard time looking around the world over the past 75 years since the end of the second world war and seeing very many examples of where US military intervention could be considered an unqualified success. We fought to a stalemate in Korea and perhaps that is better than the entire country under the rule of Kim Jung-un and his communist monarchy. Perhaps our intervention in Kosovo stopped some of the worst genocidal tendencies from manifesting there. And perhaps some of our interventions in Kurdistan did some help but mainly to address chaos that we ourselves created.

On the other hand, were we have taken a different approach like with the hard years of diplomacy and peacemaking that went along with the Good Friday Accords in 1998 that resolved the Northern Ireland conflict the results have been lasting.

I don't think drawing down military power and the impulse to intervene necessarily means withdrawing from the world. The Chinese, for example, are aggressively expanding around the planet but with a largely different and more commercial approach than what the US did in the later half of the 20th Century where we built military bases and expanded our military presence to every corner of the globe. And were always quick to intervene militarily. I'm not saying the Chinese are a model, far from it. But they are an example of how power and influence doesn't necessarily come from the barrel of a gun. As the old saying goes, when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

The problem in Afghanistan is that the original mission to eradicate the foreign Al-Qaeda forces more or less ended in 2001 when we chased them out of Tora Bora and back to Pakistan. Everything after that point was mission creep into nation building which we have never successfully done. We have done nation-rebuilding in Germany and Japan which has worked. But those were already modern societies and just needed their broken stuff fixed. They weren't medieval peasant societies like Afghanistan. Honestly I would say pick an easier target like Guatemala or El Salvador for "nation building" and prove you can actually build a modern secular society before tackling something so enormously complicated as Afghanistan on the other side of the world. Or frankly for that matter, do eastern Kentucky or West Virginia first, where the economy is spiraling and society is awash in opioid abuse. Show us you can do an "easy" project first before jumping into the big leagues of nation building with Afghanistan.

[Josh]

I find it fairly easy, as an Anabaptist Christian, to say that I don't think neo-conservatives should have been able to influence the govenrment in order to spend $6.4 trillion on invading Iraq and Afghanistan and then staying there for 20 years.

It's not wrong to criticise invading other countries (I would hesitate to criticise a nation defending itself being invaded), particularly on the other side of the globe... nor is it wrong to criticise inordinate amounts of wasted money, much of it spend on arms. It's not good to flood the world with weapons of all sorts.

[Humble Disciple]

Though I agree with the idea of withdrawing from Afghanistan, Biden did it in the wrong way.

He should have prepared the Afghan military to operate without U.S. air support, while also safely helping our allies in Afghanistan to evacuate.

If anyone deserves to get blamed for what's going on in Afghanistan right now, Bush deserves it the most.

And let's not forget that Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, right after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

[Ken]

The problem isn't how the Afghan army was trained. They had 20 years worth of training from some of the best military experts in the world.

The problem was the enormous corruption and the fact that from top to bottom the Afghan army took money from the Taliban to lay down their weapons and walk away without firing a shot.

Although from a certain point of view that isn't so much a problem. If we start from the assumption that the Afghan army and government wasn't going to be able to stand on its own over the long term. Which seems to be the universal assumption from all the military analysists. Then the only meaningful question is how much death and destruction are going to accompany their defeat and transition. They managed to pull it off without hardly firing a shot. Would you have preferred if the Afghan army had gone down fighting after destroying half the country with combat and killing thousands or tends of thousands of military and civilians. Would that have been a preferable outcome?

Here is a Washington Post article detailing the corruption and why the army folded overnight. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/20 ... e-taliban/

KABUL — The spectacular collapse of Afghanistan’s military that allowed Taliban fighters to walk into the Afghan capital Sunday despite 20 years of training and billions of dollars in American aid began with a series of deals brokered in rural villages between the militant group and some of the Afghan government’s lowest-ranking officials.

The deals, initially offered early last year, were often described by Afghan officials as cease-fires, but Taliban leaders were in fact offering money in exchange for government forces to hand over their weapons, according to an Afghan officer and a U.S. official.

Over the next year and a half, the meetings advanced to the district level and then rapidly on to provincial capitals, culminating in a breathtaking series of negotiated surrenders by government forces, according to interviews with more than a dozen Afghan officers, police, special operations troops and other soldiers.

Within a little more than a week, Taliban fighters overran more than a dozen provincial capitals and entered Kabul with no resistance, triggering the departure of Afghanistan’s president and the collapse of his government. Afghan security forces in the districts ringing Kabul and in the city itself simply melted away. By nightfall, police checkpoints were left abandoned and the militants roamed the streets freely.

“Some just wanted the money,” an Afghan special forces officer said of those who first agreed to meet with the Taliban. But others saw the U.S. commitment to a full withdrawal as an “assurance” that the militants would return to power in Afghanistan and wanted to secure their place on the winning side, he said. The officer spoke on the condition of anonymity because he, like others in this report, was not authorized to disclose information to the press.

The Doha agreement, designed to bring an end to the war in Afghanistan, instead left many Afghan forces demoralized, bringing into stark relief the corrupt impulses of many Afghan officials and their tenuous loyalty to the country’s central government. Some police officers complained that they had not been paid in six months or more.

“They saw that document as the end,” the officer said, referring to the majority of Afghans aligned with the government. “The day the deal was signed we saw the change. Everyone was just looking out for himself. It was like [the United States] left us to fail.”

The negotiated surrenders to the Taliban slowly gained pace in the months following the Doha deal, according to a U.S. official and an Afghan officer. Then, after President Biden announced in April that U.S. forces would withdraw from Afghanistan this summer without conditions, the capitulations began to snowball.

[Humble Disciple]

The problem isn't how the Afghan army was trained. They had 20 years worth of training from some of the best military experts in the world.

They were never trained to fight the Taliban without U.S. support.

Afghanistan’s military was molded to match American operations and collapsed without U.S. air support and intelligence
https://www.wsj.com/articles/afghanista ... 1628958253

While I believe that withdrawing from Afghanistan was the right decision, Biden should have at least helped our collaborators in Afghanistan to flee the country. Now the Taliban is going door-to-door, killing anyone who supported the United States.

[Grace]

The problem isn't how the Afghan army was trained. They had 20 years worth of training from some of the best military experts in the world.

They were never trained to fight the Taliban without U.S. support.

Afghanistan’s military was molded to match American operations and collapsed without U.S. air support and intelligence
https://www.wsj.com/articles/afghanista ... 1628958253

While I believe that withdrawing from Afghanistan was the right decision, Biden should have at least helped our collaborators in Afghanistan to flee the country. Now the Taliban is going door-to-door, killing anyone who supported the United States.

Agreed. Many people are not opposed to removing the military from Afghanistan. It's that Biden so badly bungled the exit. He left Americans and loyal Afghans who helped the United States for 20 years BEHIND. He left millions in munitions for the Taliban, BEHIND.

[Ken]

Here is where some of your hard-earned tax dollars went. This is who some people seem to think we should have spent more time, money, and lives propping up.